Social Media

PinClout measures your influence on Pinterest

By Lani Rosales

Posted on February 24, 2012

Pinterest power players

AGBeat has led the conversation surrounding visual bookmarking site, Pinterest.com by showing you months ago how to use the site, then demonstrated how it can be used in business and have even shared tips on adding Pinterest to your Facebook Page. The bandwagon is big and not only is traffic to the site exploding, interest in the site is as well.

We waited for Klout to integrate Pinterest into their offering, but they have not, so to fill the void in the era of social proof is PinClout which offers users to discover their PinClout.

There has been little to no notice of the site’s launch, so not much is known about the site, but we gather that the scores are based on eight factors – total pins, total repins, total boards, total likes, total comments, total followers and total following, and a quick look at the scores on their landing page, they are all quite low which could possibly be because most users are so new to what is still an invite-only network. The company tweeted, “We will be much more than just a score, planning to roll out powerful trend data and analytics soon.”

The site seems to be operating in stealth with no “About” page or completed profile on any of the entrepreneur websites. With a little digging, we discovered the co-founders are tech entrepreneurs Daniel Schimpfoessl (founder of Purefield) and Chris Fay (founder of the recently sold AdRavage.com, as well as Fashionify.com), both hailing from Kansas.

We do beg our readers, however, not to pin for the sake of altering their score (although we know some will). The site will easily catch a lot of grief for measuring influence on Pinterest as Klout has, but there is a large segment of the digital population that values scoring systems, no matter how arbitrary or flawed, so the new startup is well timed. It will be interesting to watch how they grow and if they are acquired by a company like Klout or Pinterest itself, or if they boom just as Pinterest has.

Below is what a score card looks like: